Michigan’s gameplan last week was to build around one of the most consistently effective offensive plays in college football: the Mesh. Now listen, everybody meshes. It’s the favorite play of schools with questionable quarterbacks, and the base play that the air raid offense is built from. Unless you’re really good at fades mesh is probably your go-to goal-line passing offense. I know it probably wasn’t the plan, but a mesh-based game was also perfect for O’Korn.

At its core, Mesh is a short, easy, and rather cheap passing play designed to cross a pair of drag routes in hopes of creating a ton of traffic for the coverage. Imagine the above with the strong safety ($) trying to trail the blue tight end: what hope does the red cornerback have of staying with the red tight end with all of those bodies around?

That of course is if they catch man defense. If it’s zone, well, crossing routes are zone-beaters: just run the receivers into open ground and have them sit down for easy yardage.

We’ve been writing under the assumption that our readers were all around for the early Rich Rodriguez years, and bought the edition of HTTV where Chris Brown described how Rodriguez-era West Virginia DC Jeff Casteel’s version of it worked. Now that it appears to be Michigan’s base defense (at least versus spread and option teams), maybe it’s time for a refresher.

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A PLAY:

Here’s the most common offensive play in football, Inside Zone, getting straight-up murdered:

The idea here is there’s always (mostly) a linebacker blitzing to be the 4th DL. Functionally McCray is a lineman, but if you’re the offense you don’t know that. Watch the right guard, #74, get totally discombobulated at this discovery.

My drawing here shows the run fits and the Don Brown version of the terminology. This particular play had a few variants:

The two ends are a little offset and Winovich motions inside on the play: that’s because those guys are both taking interior gaps.

The CB blitzed.

Only the first thing is interesting for understanding a 3-3-5. This defense, at its heart, is a one-gap, 4-2-5, except it trades the beef up front of a 4-man line for never knowing who’s in what gap or even who’s going to be the 4th lineman.

This segment has a sponsor! Reader/business attorney/blogger Richard Hoeg loves football because he says it is the most litigious of all sports. I can’t say that’s why I like football, but I really like that this is why my lawyer likes football.

Richard recently left a lucrative career in big law to start his own firm, where he helps outfits like ours start, operate, fund, and expand their businesses. His small group has clients including a national pizza chain and a major video game publisher, plus an array of university professors, entrepreneurs, and licensees. Hit up hoeglaw.com or Rick himself at [email protected], or read his blog(!) Rules of the Game.

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THE PLAY:

I think something happened here.

Depending on whom you’re talking to, today’s concept is a concept, an offense, a philosophy, or a way of life, though all who use it will agree anyone who defines it differently than they do doesn’t know what they’re talking about.* Though nobody on Michigan’s schedule commits to it fully, bits of it populate every passing offense today, and big chunks have been reintroduced to Michigan’s schedule with Kevin Wilson going to Ohio State, and Minnesota and Purdue hiring P.J. Fleck and Jeff Brohm, respectively.

It’s the Run & Shoot, the Libertarianism of football philosophies, and like its third-rail metaphor the first thing you need to know about it is that few people can talk about it without getting pissed off. Observe this salty convert to the Church of Shoot:

“Going somewhere where they don’t have route conversions into certain coverages was just absurd,” said Jacobs, who played nine NFL seasons. “They’re just running routes in the defense, getting people killed. Size and strength is what they had, and that’s why they won. Let’s be real. They had great assistant coaches, but Jim didn’t know what he was doing. Jim had no idea. Jim is throwing slants into Cover-2 safeties, getting people hurt. That guy knew nothing, man.

That was the Brandon Jacobs line that got him into one of this offseason’s more unexpected Harbaugh news cycles, with Michigan fans, Harbaugh fans, and anyone who knows their ass from a go-route on one side, nobody of consequence on the other, and some NFL types trying to stoke something out of it anyway.

Despite said efforts what controversy came of it quickly petered out, not because the sides came together, but because the disagreement was ultimately too wonky for the kinds of audiences an apparent Harbaugh-former player beef would attract. As soon as Kevin Gilbride’s name came up, knee-depth football fans gave up and left it for the deep geeks to figure out.

This segment has a sponsor! Reader/previous MGoSponsor Richard Hoeg noticed I’d made an offhand comment once about how this series doesn’t get a lot of responses and wanted to make sure we kept it around, so now he’s tying us contractually to it.

Richard recently left a lucrative career in big law to start his own firm, where he helps outfits like ours start, operate, fund, and expand their businesses. His small group has clients including a national pizza chain and a major video game publisher, plus an array of university professors, entrepreneurs, and licensees. Hit up hoeglaw.com or Rick himself at [email protected], or read his blog(!) Rules of the Game.

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The Play:

So this is a zone/power hybrid that Michigan ran last year instead of outside zone, and had it run consistently against us in the latter half of the season. We call it “Pin and Pull” but it also goes by “Packer Sweep” or “Double Power” or “Student Body Right.” It’s really old, and was all the rage at the top levels of football until the less extreme/simpler to install outside zone occupied most of its niche. But pin and pull is still popular, and made a comeback in recent years as power blocking came back in vogue and offensive coaches searched for a way to punish defenses for putting smaller coverage dudes around the edges of the box.

WHAT IS IT?

The concept seems simple enough: block down everyone you can, and pull everyone else around. Pin and pull. Based on the defensive front any guy on your line (and you want your line extended to tight ends and beyond for this) might be pulling, or blocking down, or executing a reach block or combo block.

Ideally, you’re getting all of those dangerous DL blocked with your own heavy OL and TEs from advantageous positions, then swinging more meat to the point of attack to meet the smaller defenders—cornerbacks, safeties, OLBs, hybrids, etc.—who hang out there. From there it’s a matter of your back reading his blocks, and physics.

Given Michigan’s TE-heavy roster and power run orientation this looks to be a bigger part of our own future—right now it’s the basis of those sweeps we pull out from time to time. We’ll also see it a lot on defense, since even without Peppers Don Brown is often going to leave an open invitation to try it.

So today we’re going to get into a play that we’ve discussed a ton on this site: The Inverted Veer, also called a Power Read. From 2011-2013 it was the Michigan offense’s best play (even if Borges might have run it incorrectly). Since 2012 it’s also been the staple play of Ohio State’s offense. If you close your eyes and think of a collegiate Tim Tebow or Cam Newton or Cardale Jones play where they fake handoff to the running back before a QB plunged straight ahead for an unstoppable 6-8 yards, that was probably an Inverted Veer.

WHAT IS IT?

The best way to think of it is the reverse of the zone-read option. Whereas Rich Rodriguez’s option play was all about reading the backside edge defender, Inverted Veer is about optioning a frontside guy.

Basically the QB and RB will option a frontside EMLOS (end man on the line of scrimmage) by having the RB jetting outside while the QB reads the unblocked end and decides to give it to his buddy as he passes, or if the DE leaves enough space, charging downfield.

That’s it. I showed power on the diagram because that’s probably the best way to block it, but you can run this successfully with a variety of blocking so long as the DL are all secured on the backside. Major variations on it are whether you go inside or outside of the last DT you blocked, and how you want your TEs and receivers and whatever other material to execute various stalk blocks, kickouts and cracks.

It’s also a sort of personnel reversal from a zone read. On ZR the running back ends up reading his blocks and finding an interior gap, while a QB keep puts the quarterback out in space. With Inverted Veer the RB is the one threatening to edge the defense while the quarterback is charging headlong into it. That last bit is why it’s such a great play for all of those truckstick quarterbacks I mentioned: Once the defense converges that big QB will have a lot of downhill momentum.

We’ve been using this offseason to learn about some of the tools in Harbaugh’s inside running game toolbox, and have so far neglected one of my favorites: Split Zone. This play today is a mainstay of Rich Rod’s offense and its derivatives, since the blocking is almost exactly the same as a base inside zone read right up until the guy who thought he was forming up to play an option gets blindsided by a large, laterally moving TE.

But it originated in under center two-back offenses, and remains an important curveball for I-form teams like Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan State. If you’re going to be running inside zone, like, at all, and you’re not in a 4- or 5-wide formation all the time, you probably run this play and variations on it at least 3 or 4 times a game.

Let’s draw it up.

ignore McDoooooom—he’s just there to get the fans yelling “McDooooooom” and distract from what’s really going on

No, that line from the “T” to the “M” isn’t Hurst blocking Devin Bush—it means the guard and center will combo the the DT and the middle linebacker. This is true for most zone plays so I might just start drawing things up this way from now on.

This particular example from the Spring Game had some motioning and a fake jet, and the defense threw a few curveballs at it that the blocking handled as they were supposed to. We’re going to ignore those for now then come back and discuss them later when we’ve established the basics of what’s going on here.

How it works

Split zone is a riff on inside zone but flips the attack order: rather than reading outside-inside-backside like on most zone plays, Split Zone wants to hit that north-south cutback lane first, only going to frontside gaps when that’s not available. They do this by flipping the backside blocking tree, so that all of the usual gaps defenders think they’re going to be defending are not really the gaps they’re defending. That leaves an unblocked backside defender who gets whacked by a catchy-blocky fellow coming from the other side of the backfield.

Its strength is that at first blush it’s inside zone, which threatens a bunch of gaps to the strongside, with a backside cutback. But split zone is attacking the backside first, leaving the frontside gaps as a Plan B.

looks like inside zone

The key difference occurs with the backside blocking. Rather than kicking out the EMLOS (end man on the line of scrimmage), the backside OT will ignore the edge and check the gap inside of him, moving downfield if nobody shows. The backside guard and center are still going to combo the nose tackle, but they’re trying to get around the opposite side, so a nose tackle who tries to get to the frontside of the center is just putting himself in the wrong hole.

Now for the kicker. Remember how we left that EMLOS on the backside unblocked, right where the play design is going? Don’t worry we’ve got a plan for him: a fullback or tight end should be coming across the formation, then using that latitudinal head of steam to bang open the hole (the orange block in the above gif).

If the offense is lucky, the defensive end, upon realizing that the tackle inside him isn’t trying to kick, will think he’s getting optioned and form up outside to force a tough read while the middle linebacker fears play-action and stays back to read the backfield action.